For the love of honey: Goa gets a whiff of the sweet liquid

Yes, honey tasting is really a thing and it would be Winnie the Pooh’s dream job

Photo Caption: Honey tasting workshop is similar to a wine tasting session

If you’re a teetotaller, honey tasting instead of wine may just be your thing! Vijaya Pastala, beekeeper and Founder of ‘Under the Mango Tree,’ an organic, raw honey label, holds out two platters to an audience at a pop-up spice laboratory at the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) hosted in Panjim, Goa. On one are almonds, chocolate, coffee and cheese, and on the other are fistfuls of wheat and rice. After quizzing the audience for a few minutes, she reveals that the grain is wind pollenated, while the former is produce derived from crops pollenated by bees. This means that if honeybees became extinct, the world would lose 95 per cent of their food sources.

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Honey tasting at a pop-up spice laboratory at the Serendipity Arts Festival

A honey tasting is similiar to a wine tasting

The audiences are asked to taste the honey and look for for distinctive flavours—floral, spicy and fruity

If honeybees became extinct, the world would lose 95 per cent of their food sources

The Art of Tasting Honey

Invited by the curators of the Culinary Arts at the SAF 2018, Vijaya piques the palette with a honey tasting session. The process is fairly similar to a wine tasting: you close your eyes and pinch your nose, dab some honey on a spatula and then smell the honey for top notes, like you would with a fragrance. Then you taste the honey for distinctive flavours—floral, spicy, fruity and sometimes, not even sweet. You take note of the consistency of the liquid and the colour—amber, gold or a hue close to transparent. You guess the terroir and a more advanced apiarist would even take a shot at the species that made it: Apis Millifera, a European pedigree that was imported to India, Apis Cerana or Apis Dorsata, both endemic to South Asia.

Nectars from India

Honey wheels are again similar to wine and cheese wheels that help make flavour associations. We are offered six varieties to dabble with, a honey from the Chambal ravines made from sweet clover that mixes well with milk and turmeric. The second tastes like apples and cinnamon, but actually turns out to be litchi honey from Muzaffarpur in Bihar. Another tastes bittersweet like cough syrup, a honey derived from the jamun tree with many medicinal benefits.

Photo Caption: Honey from India lends different flavours based on which region it is from

Vijaya points out that while these three are single origin, we also have multi-flora honey, like the one she offers us next, that is grainy and scratches the throat, made from mahua, neem, palash and karanj. Even though the variety after that tastes very different, Vijaya tells us that they are actually the same ingredients, but with a honey from the Narmada Valley. Just like wine, the terroir has an immense impact on the end result. As the Indian taste palate gets more nuanced, and we start choosing custom honey labels over tampered commercial brands, the food industry in the country will witness a demand for honey sommeliers.